GO ON, GIVE SOMETHING UP FOR LENT! – March 2^nd 2006

 

Tess Stimson, 38, is a British-born novelist who lives in Florida with her husband and three children aged 11, 8 and 3.

 

 

hen I was ten, I had my tonsils out. I remember waking up in the recovery ward, every swallow feeling like I had razor blades in my throat. My first hazy sight was of my younger sister, shooting daggers at me from the other side of the room.

 

‘The doctor says you’re to eat jelly and ice-cream,’ she said furiously before I was even fully conscious. ‘It’s not fair. It’s Lent.’

 

Instantly I appreciated the enormity of her outrage. In our very Roman Catholic family, we all had to give up puddings and sweets every year for Lent, the six-and-a-half week penitential period between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday.

 

If my parents were feeling particularly sackcloth-and-ashes, they sometimes gave up drinking and smoking too. And now here I was, being handed a Get Out of Lent Free card by the doctor.

 

Later, as a wiseass teenager, I decided to ‘give up giving up.’ For years I barely marked Easter at all, other than to indulge my passion for Cadbury’s Crème Eggs. But five years ago, the last Lent before my mother died, I asked her why she still bothered, when even the Church no longer insisted on it.

 

‘People don’t know what self-denial is anymore,’ she said. ‘You’ve forgotten how to say no to things that make you feel good. Discipline is like any other muscle: if you don’t use it, you lose it. There may come a time when you really need it, and it won’t be there.’

 

At the time, I didn’t understand what she meant. But what she said piqued my pride. And so that Lent I picked the one thing I really wanted, and knew I shouldn’t have, and gave it up.

 

In my case, it was a destructive affair with a toxic bachelor, and forcing myself to stay away from him made me long for the days when I’d just renounced chocolate.

 

But actually, I was missing the point. Lent isn’t about giving up something that’s bad for us anyway; it’s about sacrificing an essential, something we really need and will sorely miss.

 

As a society, we’ve forgotten how to go without. The idea of saving to buy something seems as quaint and antiquated as a gramophone. If you can’t afford it, you put it on credit. If you can’t pay your creditors, you go bankrupt and start again.

 

We demand instant gratification in every sphere of modern life, from fast food to quickie divorces. ‘Duty’ has become a four-letter-word.

 

You can’t open the tabloids without reading about a man who’s walked out on his family because he ‘couldn’t help’ an affair with his secretary/nanny/intern, as if her knickers just happened to fall off as he walked past.

 

Kiss-and-tell floozies beat a path to Max Clifford’s door with stories of married men they ‘couldn’t resist.’

 

Mothers abandon small children home alone while they waltz off on holiday to Turkey to whoop it up with lovers half their age.

 

Career women – with no financial imperative to work – dump their infants in crèches so they can race back to the office without sacrificing any aspect of their have-it-all lifestyles.

 

Children shunt their elderly parents into care homes rather than give up the spare bedroom – or their spare time. 

 

And yet our own parents and grandparents endured terrible hardships for the sake of their country; many made the ultimate sacrifice. Heaven forefend that we ever have to fight another war such as the two that engulfed the globe in the last century.

 

But if the call came, how many of us would have the strength to answer it without falling apart?

 

We’re a generation that lays flowers at the roadside to mark the deaths of those we never knew, and calls in grief counselors when tragedy touches our lives, however tangentially.

 

We suffer from ‘stress’ and ‘depression’, because we’ve forgotten what privation feels like. In the Third World, mired as it is in famine and civil war, no-one has time for such self-indulgent complaints.

 

Hundreds of thousands perish every day from malnutrition and disease while our own pampered teenagers check themselves into clinics to cope with anorexia.

 

As a nation, we lack strength of character. I wish I could claim to be different, but I’m as coddled as the next girl; when my washing-machine breaks down, the schlep to the launderetted assumes tragic proportions. I can’t imagine how my grandmother coped with a mangle.

 

 

uslims have Ramadan, a period of observance roughly a month long, during which they abstain from food and drink from sunrise to sunset, believing that to have control over your hunger is to have control over your mind and body. Judaism too has periods of fasting and abstinence.

 

It takes a strong will to resist temptation. We all need to be able to say no to immediate pleasure, for the sake of long-term gain.

 

When self-gratification becomes an end in itself, we are all threatened. The result is a Clockwork Orange society, where individual desires ride roughshod over the needs of others. The current sick craze known as ‘happy slapping’ demonstrates this all too well.

 

Choosing to ‘go without’ has a purpose that all three of the world’s major religions recognize. It’s not about self-improvement, or punishing yourself for sin, or trying to be better than the next person. It’s about remembering your humanity.

 

Sacrificing something you care about very much for a few weeks may not matter much in the grand scheme of things. But it is only through practice that we gain strength for when it does matter. We forget this lesson at our peril.

 

As for me, this Lent my family has given up sweet treats and snacks, and we’re giving the money we would have spent on them – around £50 a week – to our church fund.